| From the perspective of grammatical metaphor, this thesis aims to explore the changes of ideational meaning realized by English nominalization on the basis of systemic-functional grammar and text analysis within the genres of contract writings, and then goes on to discuss the application of nominalization in C-E contract translation. Halliday holds that language is produced to satisfy people’s demands, which endows language with three universally-recognized metafunctions, i.e. ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Ideational function refers to language’s role of interpreting and reflecting the subject and object world, including transitivity system, voice system and polarity system; interpersonal function stands for the impact on other people exerted by language, comprising tone system and intonation system; language integrates the above two functions in a context and thus comes textual function, which is made up of rheme system, information system and cohesion system. The language system is gradually taking shape to fulfil different semantic functions during humans’long-term interaction, and the people’s choice of language organization or the forms for their expression is an activity with certain purposes, which rests with the semantic functions to be realized. The forms of expression could usually be classified into congruent forms and incongruent forms. The classification of word types reflects human’s labelling onto different types of experiences. The congruent form abides by this original classification in describing language users’understanding and reflection of the subject and object world, and vice versa called incongruent forms. And the latter is referred to as grammatical metaphor by Halliday. Halliday also declares that nominalization serves as the most powerful source to generate grammatical metaphor, whereby process or attribute is metaphorized into a noun, thus acting as an entity in nominal groups. The process of metaphorization is featured by a "downward" shift of grammatical ranks:clause complex→clause→nominal phrase. The process of rankshift simultaneously involves changes of grammatical categories, which enables the system to expand:sequence could not only be realized by clause complex, but also by clause or phrasal group.English business contract could be defined as a document bearing a legal status which is signed in cross-border commercial activities. The business contract English has taken its form and come into use in commercial activities with English as their common language, which is characterized by both the features of commercial English and those of legal English. It grows into a linguistic functional variety in the long history of language use by people according to such pragmatic factors as social and cultural environment, the aims of communication and the object you communicate with. It doesn’t have special linguistic materials or an independent grammatical system of its own, but acts as a language variety or a register for some special use when English is applied in a legal and commercial context. It is generally admitted that contract English belongs to the frozen style, the highest level of formality. To highlight its stylistic feature of solemnity as well as emphasize its legal binding force in commercial intercourse, contract English is touched with vivid lexical qualities, that is the wide use of nominalization, and the nominalization here directs toward the metaphor at the lexico-grammatical level. This thesis sets Halliday’s grammatical metaphor as as its theoretical background, and then proceeds to illustrate the foundation supporting nominalization as a distinct stylistic feature in contract English. By contrasting and analyzing the nominal structures in contract English and their respective forms of expression in Chinese, the thesis gives a brief account of the causes leading to these differences from the perspective of the disparities between English and Chinese thinking modes. At last, the thesis generalizes the enlightenment nominalization throws on C-E contract translation. English nominalization structure serves as an indispensable tool in translating Chinese contract text into English, to put it in a nutshell, the conditions could be summarized as follows:1)translation of Chinese subject-predicate structures into English nominalizations;2) translation of Chinese verb-object (adverb) structures into English nominalizationa;3) translation of Chinese clause into English nominalization;4) translation of Chinese verb-verb structure into English nominalization;5) translation of the "……的" structure in Chinese legal documents into English nominalization.Chapter Four goes into details to elaborate on the application of nominalization in C-E contract translation. In this chapter, the author firstly introduces some relevant translation theories, afterwards she puts forward her translation strategies, summing up five basic syntactic types of nominalization’s application to C-E contract translation:1) n.+Nn.;2) Nn.+Prep.+n.;3) adj.+Nn.;4) Prep.+Nn.;5) V.+Nn.The thesis conducts its research on the application of English nominalization in C-E contract translation in the light of E-C contrastive study. In the contract translation practice, grammatical metaphor provides the theoretical ground for the translator to choose the correct linguistic form in the target-language system. Through the in-depth cognition of the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor inherent in English language, the author unravels how the inner linkage of Chinese congruent form with English metaphorical form is realized in C-E contract translation. |
